Saturday, February 26, 2011

Zombie Cupcakes: From First Bite to Delicious End?

When Zilly Rosen first told us at Zillycakes about the idea pitched to her of a zombie themed cupcake book, I was more than enthusiastic about the concept!

How can the combination of two of my favorite things go wrong? She asked if I could help, since she hadn’t seen a single zombie movie. I’ve seen them all, so I immediately started jotting down ideas.

Our first challenge was to figure out how to make the book flow from beginning to end. I revisited all my favorite zombie movies for inspiration—14!—which may seem excessive, but hey, I do love a good excuse to watch zombie movies. That’s when it hit me: we should have the book layout like a zombie movie would unfold! Once we had that structure in place, I did a little zombie 101 with Zilly and Hannah, and the three of us had no trouble brainstorming some truly Zombietastic cupcakes!

A zombie movie can start a few different ways: some fool gets bit, or some crazed scientist gets sloppy with an experiment, or a government agency carelessly disposes of their biohazardous materials. All these acts produce the first of the walking dead. From these ideas the designs for Toxic Bite, Biohazard, T-virus, and The Crows were born.

In the middle of the movie, once the flesh craving infection has begun, it’s only a matter of time before the living dead are clawing at your door for your BRAINS! This brings us to the next set of zombie inspired cupcakes: Zombie moon, Zombie Rising, and On the Loose.

Next, zombies feast! You know, this is the really good part of the movie, where zombies are everywhere eating everyone! We figured it was only fair to have some of our delectable treats designed for the zombies themselves. This inspired such cupcakes as Zombie Delight, Eye Poppers and Brain Food.

Now comes the real problem: the zombies are here, we know they want to eat us, so how do we kill them? This crucial question brought us to our next series of cupcakes in the book titled: Decapitated Zombie, Skeletal Zombie and Bludgeon to Survive.

Finally, at the end of any great zombie movie, just when you think you’re rid of the flesh craving nuisance there is always a teaser scene leading you to believe that another aombie up rising is certain. This is why we ended our book Zombie Cupcakes with a cupcake grave yard scene. Are you sure you finished the job before you buried them?

They’re coming for you, Barbara…

I had a blast helping to create this zombie crazed cupcake book, and I am grateful to Zilly for letting me be a part of it.